The Last Watchman of Old Cairo
A Novel
گزارش تخلف
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
February 12, 2018
In this evocative novel, Lukas takes readers to Cairo at three different points in its history. One thousand years ago, Ali ibn al-Marwani, a Muslim orphan, becomes the night watchman at the Ibn Ezra Synagogue. In 1897, English twin sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, arrive in Cairo to assist Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter in acquiring the ancient scrolls held in the synagogue’s storage area. And in the present, Joseph, a Berkeley graduate student who is half-Jewish, half-Muslim, receives a mysterious package from his recently deceased father, which sends him to Cairo to unravel the secret behind the unusual bequest. What binds all three stories is the legendary 2,000-year-old Ezra scroll, purported
to be the most perfect Torah scroll ever created and supposedly stored at the
synagogue. Over the centuries, Ali finds that love and duty don’t mix, Agnes and Margaret traverse a bureaucratic labyrinth to arrive at the Jewish Holy of Holies, and Joseph goes from clue to clue to unlock his father’s past and his own future. Like a contemporary Lawrence Durrell, Lukas (The Oracle of Stamboul) turns the Egyptian city into a tantalizingly seductive place of mystery. And although the story is dramatically diffuse, it is redeemed by the author’s vision of
a more hopeful world where Jews and Muslims come together over a shared cultural heritage. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc.
The Cairo Genizah is a collection of 300,000 Jewish manuscript fragments that were found in a storeroom (genizah) in Egypt. As Edoardo Ballerini narrates, the story coalesces around three characters: Ali al-Raqb, the first watchman of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo over a thousand years ago; his current-day descendant, Joseph al-Raqb; and Scottish scholars Agnes S. Lewis, Margaret D. Gibson, and Solomon Schechter, who discovered the scrolls and documents in the Cairo Genizah in 1896. Using soft Arabic and British accents interspersed with a steady uninflected narrative, Ballerini draws listeners into the worlds of ancient and contemporary Egypt. The magic of the Ezra Scroll and the ancient fragments of other documents flows through the story and transcends the generations. Ballerini's performance is as magical as the story itself. M.B.K. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
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